Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Multiracial by the numbers? The Multiracial Advocacy

Multiracial by the Numbers?

Every Friday, C-Span runs a segment called “America by the
Numbers.” It’s a way for government agencies to show the public that their
statisticians are hard at work, bringing us the latest, truest, most reliable
data.

I watched the July 13 segment. How interesting!Two government people (a health statistics agency director and a
“senior scholar”) discussed a new report on Children’s Well-Being, the result
of 22 federal agencies’ work. Wow. Oh, wait a minute.

They were explaining a new study on Children’s Well-Being.
But something was very wrong. Whenever they showed a slide or talked about a children’s health issue,
every race appeared accounted for EXCEPT multiracial children. How could
that be? They used Census data, which accounted for “two or more race people,”
yet somehow they lost us. These are some of the things they talked about while
citing and used racial statistics:

Teen
Birth Rate

Obesity
in Children

Issues
of General Disparity in Health and Health Statistics

Smoking

Second
Hand Smoke

Low
Birth Rates

Emotional
and Behavioral problems

Achievement
gaps

Health
Insurance and on and on….

Important issues! I still could not believe that they
collected the data but then dropped multiracial people OUT, so I went to the website
to read the actual report. I wish I had not done that. The introduction was
written by Katherine Wallman, Chief Statistician, Office of Management and
Budget (OMB). Wallman never did get the “multiracial thing.” My young son,
Ryan, and I had a meeting with Wallman in the early 1990s. When we walked into
her office, she said, “Hi! My son has one parent who is Jewish and one who is
Catholic and we celebrate Hanukah and Christmas,
so we understand!” Oh boy. She sent one of her aides to get “packs for Ryan.”

We tried to make her understand that race is not the same
thing as religion. Forms in the United
States do not ask people to report their
religion, and certainly not to make a choice between their mother and their
father. She could not get it, but an aide came back with two packages of
M&M’s with the White House imprint. When Ryan and I got into the elevator
to leave, he turned to me and said, “Mom, it looks like all we came away with
is some M&M’s.” He was right. He was 10-years-old.

I looked at the report online and sure enough, they had gathered multiracial data, but then dropped it on every statistical report.
They even had a chart of deaths with all races accounted for, but not our
group. A government statistician might declare from that information that
multiracial people don’t die! Sorry, but we have to be realistic.

I expect that they will say that the multiracial numbers
were insignificant, but they are actually higher
than American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific
Islander populations that DO appear in the data!

There is no doubt that health disparities exist. There is no
doubt that multiracial children exist. There is no doubt that multiracial
children have been totally disregarded in studies of well-being among all
racial and ethnic groups.